Lecture 3: Highlights of the Sexual Revolution I

Draft third lecture in the coming series: "The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences"

Feb 12, 2025

This is a draft of my third lecture in the upcoming series on “The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences”, to be sponsored by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture. It covers the major, high-profile judicial controversies: contraception, abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, etc. These are the issues that have garnered the most attention from established groups on both left and right and the mainstream media.

Frankly, I am not yet happy with this draft. It concerns matters that I do not write about regularly, and while important, so much has already been written on them that I find myself with little to add. So your comments, questions, criticisms, and suggestions will be especially valuable before I prepare the final version.

Here is an updated outline of the series as a whole. Note that I have added a lecture on the churches.

General Outline
Course Title: The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences
Lecturer: Stephen Baskerville
Scope of Lectures:
Introduction to the Sexual Revolution
Sexual Ideology
Highlights of the Sexual Revolution I:
Contraception, Abortion, Homosexualiy, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues
Highlights of the Sexual Revolution II:
Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues
Exporting the Sexual Revolution
Globalizing the Sexual Revolution
Effects of the Sexual Revolution
Responding to the Sexual Revolution
The Churches and the Sexual Revolution
The Future of the Sexual Revolution

Lesson 3

Highlights of the Sexual Ideology I: Contraception, Abortion, Homosexuality, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues

Source Texts:

Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017)

Further Readings:

Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom (Angelico, 2015)
Stephen Baskerville, “Why Is Abortion So Important to the Left?” Chronicles, 2 October 2024, https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/why-is-abortion-so-important-to-the-left/.
Carrie Gress, “The Only Way to Make Abortion Unthinkable Is to Wipe Out the Feminism Fueling It,” The Federalist, 24 January 2025, https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/24/the-only-way-to-make-abortion-unthinkable-is-to-wipe-out-the-feminism-fueling-it/
Robert Bork, Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (AEI, 2003).

Highlights of the Sexual Ideology I: Contraception, Abortion, Homosexuality, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues

The Sexual Revolution has brought profound changes in societies and governments throughout the West (and beyond) that are impossible to calculate. It is no exaggeration to say that it has been the greatest ideological force driving cultural and political change in our lifetimes.

Here again, I could spend this entire lecture just describing the cultural changes in realms like art, music, theater, education, and media alone.

But while they can be amusing or shocking (or perhaps just sad), depending on your point-of-view, it is all well known. Here I promised to concentrate on the political changes, which constitute the “commanding heights” of the Sexual Revolution. These too have also been beyond calculation in their impact throughout society.

Several specific controversies in particular have been especially salient and stood out as landmarks. Other changes have been less conspicuous but equally profound in altering the structure of governments at all levels. In fact, some of the most important changes have been notable for their lack of controversy and a conspicuous absence of active resistance. Among the most well-known controversies have been: the legalization (and proliferation) of contraception, abortion, and divorce. The legal recognition and acceptance of homosexual practice has also commanded attention and even – perhaps more surprisingly – the legal recognition of marriage between homosexuals (“same-sex marriage”), though that battle was surprisingly brief.

The Sexual Revolution has done more than any other ideological force to transform the most basic purposes of government itself. (And the fact that all these practices proliferated throughout the society on a vast scale following their legalization, provides further testimony that sometimes – contrary to the cliché – politics can be “upstream” from culture.)

~~~

In fact, one issue has stood out in the priority and salience it has been given by both advocates on the Left and opponents on the Right, as well as in the media, and that is abortion. Its importance for people on both sides is enormous and difficult to assess.

On the one hand, feminists have made it a bedrock demand and elevated it to the top of not only their own agenda but national agendas in some countries and at international forums in intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations. In the recent American presidential election, for example, abortion was pushed aggressively to the forefront of events like campaign debates, even though no evidence suggested that it was an important priority for most voters. At one point it even seemed like it was threatening to derail the election campaign, especially, of Donald Trump.

On the other hand, opponents of legalized abortion see it as an issue of absolute moral principle that, likewise, surpasses all others in importance.

I believe that abortion is a catalyst – a lightning rod, if you like – that represents deeper issues. Its overwhelming importance to the sexual Left is often said to be a matter of personal “freedom” and described as a “lifestyle” issue. I believe something more profound is at work. Seen in the larger context of the Sexual Revolution as a whole and its trajectory over decades, I believe that the sexual Left places what seems like obsessive importance on legalizing abortion because it forms an integral part of what may be the most fundamental question of our civilization: who controls the terms of reproduction.

Looking back over the years, this larger, more comprehensive agenda has served as feminism’s highest priority, and it ties together feminism’s principle ambitions.

The reproductive system involves more than what feminists call “reproductive rights” or “reproductive health”. It comprehends the larger terms – the rules – under which children are born and raised, their status in the law, who is recognized to speak for them and for their welfare, and ultimately who is authorized to control their upbringing and assume responsibility for their daily lives. All this determines nothing less than the future of our civilization itself. As a poet put it, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”

Contraception: Griswold v. Connecticut

This larger context can be seen in an earlier controversy over the legalization of contraception. This issue received comparable attention in its day, especially among Catholics. In the United States, it was determined by the landmark Supreme Court decision of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), that had global implications. In that decision, the Court made the use of birth control a constitutional right by holding that a "right to marital privacy" is "protected from governmental intrusion". Writing the majority opinion, Justice William O. Douglas invoked “notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship" (my emphasis). Yet despite this reasoning, the decision was soon applied in contexts outside marriage, including even minor children. The subsequent case of Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended the constitutional right to unmarried adults. Effectively, it legalized premarital and extramarital sex and made it a constitutional right. (Another subsequent case, Carey v. Population Services International (1977) pushed the reasoning still further – and indeed, has perplexed many observers – by extending the constitutional right to include even minor children.)

Abortion: Roe v. Wade

The Griswold and Eisenstadt decisions, in turn, served as precedents and stepping stones whose reasoning served to validate the even more contentious decision that effectively made abortion a constitutional right in the United States: Roe v. Wade (1973). This decision remained the “law of the land” until it was overturned (apparently) in the recent decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). This returned regulation of abortion to the state governments under the 10th Amendment.

Sodomy: Lawrence v. Texas

While these controversies involved reproduction and therefore relations of heterosexuality, the reasoning behind them was also used in another realm of sexuality: homosexuality. Lawrence v. Texas (2003) declared unconstitutional a Texas sodomy law that prohibited intimate sexual contact between members of the same sex. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion described the "right to privacy" found in Griswold and other cases as supporting legal recognition of a constitutional right to engage in homosexual sex.

This case directly and explicitly overturned another case, only recently decided, that had held precisely the opposite principle: Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). The Supreme Court rarely “overturns” an existing precedent directly by declaring it to be in error. Normally, it prefers to devise reasoning that has the effect of weakening undesired precedents by rendering them inapplicable to subsequent cases. In this case, however, the Court acted more boldly.

Same-Sex Marriage: Obergefell v. Hodges

Moving ahead a few years, and following from Lawrence, another controversy achieved intense but surprisingly brief prominence. This was the legal recognition of same-sex “marriage”. One might have thought that such a complex public question and striking legal innovation – and one that involved complicated questions about the relations between private life and the state (not to mention church and state) – might have involved more agonizing legal reasoning than, for example, the relatively simple matter of private homosexual sexual practice. Yet official recognition of same-sex marriage was apparently settled with surprising rapidity and ease, While it was still being intensely debated in the early twenty-first century, at all levels of government and throughout the West, and no public consensus can be said to have yet emerged, it was resolved abruptly – at least in the United States (which usually sets the trends) – in a single sweeping measure by the US Supreme Court in their dramatic decision of Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Here too, the legal reasoning used in earlier decisions like Griswold, Roe, and Lawrence were invoked.

All these cases – and the questions and issues they claimed to resolve – are closely connected in terms of the legal reasoning behind them, which is similar and shared among them all, despite involving diverse issue areas. Each case served as a precedent to justify similar reasoning in subsequent cases. In other words, a single logic connects them all and dominated legal thinking and argument for a half-century (1965 to 2015). These include interpretation of concepts like a constitutional right of “privacy” (4th Amendment, the right to “due process of law”, the right to the “equal protection of the laws” (14th Amendment), and the recognition of possible additional rights that may not be explicitly enumerated in constitutional documents such as bills of rights (10th Amendment).

Equally striking is that the same legal reasoning that was used to justify what might seem to some to be relatively straightforward matters like possessing contraceptive devices or engaging private sexual practice – this same reasoning was invoked, apparently with equal ease, to rationalize more complex and contentious matters, like extending the right to birth control to minor children (involving parental rights and family privacy), an argued right of abortion (involving unborn children, plus other third parties), and same-sex marriage (bringing complications for relations between individuals, private household life, and state authority or between church and state.)

Larger Questions

The story behind all these decisions – especially Roe v. Wade in the half-century since it was issued – are well known, and I will not enter here into details. But in my opinion, and from the perspective of today, these decisions all raise two broad and essential questions – not only about the substance of contraception, abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and other issues. They also raise basic questions about our politics – and how we approach sensitive questions like individual and family privacy, parental rights and authority, and family policy that I plan to address in a later lecture on the “Effects of the Sexual Revolution”. But to pose these questions here only briefly:

1. Why is the judiciary being permitted to make such momentous decisions, sometimes even in the face of vehement opposition from the two democratically elected branches of government – the legislative and executive – at both the federal and state levels? What does this practice say about judicial power in the United States (and increasingly elsewhere in the world) and the role of the Sexual Revolution in augmenting judicial power?
2. Why did opponents of the Roe decision and others fail so completely to reverse this decision during the half-century that ensued, despite making it their highest priority? Even now that the Roe decision has apparently been “overturned”, some opponents of abortion are disappointed that the Dobbs decision has not had the effect that they had hoped in effectively curtailing or prohibiting abortion.
In fact, similar questions might be asked of the other decisions (and of the Sexual Revolution generally). For example, in the case of Obergefell: Why did the opposition to same-sex marriage collapse so quickly? In fact, why has opposition on all these issues been so generally ineffective?

These two larger questions – the extraordinary judicial power in implementing the Sexual Revolution and the failure of the opposition – are questions I hope to answer in the lectures that follow. In fact, they raise a larger question about the Sexual Revolution in general – not only in the United States (which again, largely determines the trends), but throughout the West: Why has the Sexual Revolution been so spectacularly successful, and why has the opposition to it failed so conspicuously to halt or slow its “progress”?

~~~

The cases and controversies described above form the most salient and visible political battles of the Sexual Revolution.

But on a more subtle level, other political innovations in government power have exerted an equal impact, and perhaps an even greater one. Yet some of these have received much less attention (or are not necessarily even perceived as being part of the Sexual Revolution).

In fact, two important developments involved not merely court decisions, but major innovations in the very nature of government power – changes that can only be described as revolutionary. Indeed, within a short space of time, the Americans led the rest of the West by enacting what may be the two most radical innovations ever undertaken in the role and power of the secular state.

I will discuss these in the next lecture…….

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

Stephen Baskerville's Newsletter

Discussion about this post